He's remembered for his politics, but it is the Bard of Barking's love songs that endure. Bragg's debut, Life's a Riot With Spy vs Spy, sounded like little else released in 1983, with its crunchy electric guitar and that almost-bluff almost-bellow.

In debt to punk, but also to English folk and iconoclastic Yanks Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs, Bragg focused more on the politics of the personal in songs like Milkman of Human Kindness. Included here are his first three albums, plus the 1990 EP The Internationale, with a wealth of extra tracks material.

By 1986's Talking With the Taxman About Poetry - which has bourgeois indulgences such as a trumpet and the jangle of Johnny Marr's guitar - the deadweight of Thatcherism was producing more overtly political material, which now induces an odd nostalgia for a time when the two major parties were distinguishable by their policies.